Top Ten Battles

The Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943) was the largest confrontation of World War II in which Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia.

The Battle of Gettysburg (locally / ˈ ɡ ɛ t ɪ s b ɜːr ɡ / ( listen), with an / s / sound) was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War.

The Siege of Yorktown, also known as the Battle of Yorktown, the Surrender at Yorktown, German Battle or the Siege of Little York, ending on October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, was a decisive victory by a combined force of American Continental Army troops led by General George Washington and French Army troops led by the Comte de Rochambeau over a British Army commanded by British peer and Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis.

The Battle of Gaugamela (/ ˌ ɡ ɔː ɡ ə ˈ m iː l ə /; Greek: Γαυγάμηλα), also called the Battle of Arbela (Greek: Ἄρβηλα), was the decisive battle of Alexander the Great's invasion of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.

The Battle of Vienna (German: Schlacht am Kahlen Berge or Kahlenberg; Polish: bitwa pod Wiedniem or odsiecz wiedeńska (The Relief of Vienna); Modern Turkish: İkinci Viyana Kuşatması, Ottoman Turkish: Beç Ḳalʿası Muḥāṣarası) took place at Kahlenberg Mountain near Vienna on 12 September 1683 after the imperial city had been besieged by the Ottoman Empire for two months.

Battle of Antietam. The Battle of Antietam /ænˈtiːtəm/, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South, was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson, beginning the Norman conquest of England.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack, also known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor, led to the United States' entry into World War II.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, kicked off the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). Tensions had been building for many years between residents of the 13 American colonies and the British authorities, particularly in Massachusetts.

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The Tet Offensive was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The offensive was an attempt to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Normandy invasion began with overnight parachute and glider landings, massive air attacks and naval bombardments. In the early morning, amphibious landings commenced on five beaches codenamed Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah, with troops from the United States landing on Omaha and Utah, Great Britain landing on Gold and Sword and Canada landing on Juno.

The Battle of Kursk was a Second World War engagement between German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front near Kursk (450 kilometres or 280 miles south-west of Moscow) in the Soviet Union, during July and August 1943.

The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies, during the War of the Third Coalition (August–December 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815).

The Battle of Tours (10 October 732) – also called the Battle of Poitiers and, by Arab sources, the Battle of the Palace of the Martyrs (Arabic: معركة بلاط الشهداء ‎, translit.

The Battle of Midway, along with the Guadalcanal Campaign, is widely considered a turning point in the Pacific War.

The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in eastern Belgium, northeast France, and Luxembourg, towards the end of World War II.

The Battle of France, also known as the Fall of France, was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries during the Second World War. In six weeks from 10 May 1940, German forces defeated Allied forces by mobile operations and conquered France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, bringing land operations on the Western Front to an end until 6 June 1944.

The Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations (Russian: Битва народов, Bitva narodov; German: Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig; French: Bataille des Nations, Swedish: Slaget vid Leipzig) was fought from 16 to 19 October 1813, at Leipzig, Saxony.

The Battle of Moscow ... Immediately after the Moscow counter-offensive, a series of Soviet attacks (the Battles of Rzhev) were attempted against the salient, ...

The Battle of the Somme was one of the costliest battles of World War I. The original Allied estimate of casualties on the Somme, made at the Chantilly Conference on 15 November 1916, was 485,000 British and French casualties and 630,000 German.

The Battle of Thermopylae (/ θ ər ˈ m ɒ p ɪ l iː / thər-MOP-i-lee; Greek: Μάχη τῶν Θερμοπυλῶν, Machē tōn Thermopylōn) was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece.

Battle of Marathon. The Battle of Marathon (Greek: μάχη τοῦ μαραθῶνος, Machē tou Marathōnos) took place in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece. It was fought between the citizens of Athens, aided by Plataea, and a Persian force commanded by Datis and Artaphernes.

The World War I First Battle of the Marne featured the first use of radio intercepts and automotive transport of troops in wartime. After French commander in chief Joseph Joffre ordered an offensive in September 1914, General Michel-Joseph Maunoury’s French Sixth Army opened a gap between Germany’s First and Second Armies.

The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War, and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville Campaign. It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville.

The Battle of Himera (480 BC), supposedly fought on the same day as the more famous Battle of Salamis, or at the same time as the Battle of Thermopylae, saw the Greek forces of Gelon, King of Syracuse, and Theron, tyrant of Agrigentum, defeat the Carthaginian force of Hamilcar the Magonid, ending a Carthaginian bid to restore the deposed tyrant of ...

The Battle of Yarmouk was a major battle between the army of the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Arab forces of the Rashidun Caliphate. The battle consisted of a series of engagements that lasted for six days in August 636, near the Yarmouk River, along what today are the borders of Syria–Jordan and Syria–Israel, east of the Sea of Galilee.

Despite heavy Confederate casualties (9,000), the Battle of Second Bull Run (known as Second Manassas in the South) was a decisive victory for the rebels, as Lee had managed a strategic offensive against an enemy force (Pope and McClellan’s) twice the size of his own.

The Guadalcanal Campaign, also known as the Battle of Guadalcanal and codenamed Operation Watchtower by American forces, was a military campaign fought between 7 August 1942 and 9 February 1943 on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theater of World War II.

Huaihai Campaign (Chinese: 淮 海 戰 役; pinyin: Huái hǎi Zhàn yì) or Battle of Hsupeng (simplified Chinese: 徐 蚌 会 战; traditional Chinese: 徐 蚌 會 戰; pinyin: Xú bèng Huì zhàn) was one of the military conflicts in the late stage of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China.

The Battle of Verdun (Bataille de Verdun, IPA: [bataj də vɛʁdœ̃], Schlacht um Verdun, IPA: [ʃlaxt ˀʊm ˈvɛɐdœŋ]), fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916, was the largest and longest battle of the First World War on the Western Front between the German and French armies.

The Siege of Vicksburg (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War.

The Battle of Agincourt (/ ˈ æ ʒ ɪ n k ʊ r /; in French, Azincourt; French pronunciation: ) was a major English victory in the Hundred Years' War. The battle took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) in the County of Saint-Pol, Artois, some 40 km south of Calais (now Azincourt in northern France).

Although the battle actually took place near Allenstein , Hindenburg named it after Tannenberg, 30 km to the west, in order to, in German eyes, avenge the defeat of the Teutonic Knights 500 years earlier at the Battle of Grunwald (which was always known as the Battle of Tannenberg in German).

The Battle of Warsaw refers to the decisive Polish victory in 1920 during the Polish–Soviet War. Poland, on the verge of total defeat, repulsed and defeated the invading Red Army. As Soviet forces invaded Poland in summer 1920, the Polish army retreated westward in disarray.

The Battle of Cannae (/ ˈ k æ n i ˌ-n eɪ ˌ-n aɪ /) was a major battle of the Second Punic War that took place on 2 August 216 BC in Apulia, in southeast Italy. The army of Carthage, under Hannibal, surrounded and decisively defeated a larger army of the Roman Republic under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro.

The battle in Berlin was an end phase of the Battle of Berlin. While the Battle of Berlin encompassed the attack by three Soviet Army Groups to capture not only Berlin but the territory of Germany east of the River Elbe still under German control, the battle in Berlin details the fighting and German capitulation that took place within the city.

Operation Market Garden (17–25 September 1944) was an unsuccessful Allied military operation planned, and predominantly led, by the British. It was fought in the Netherlands and Germany in World War II.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (German: Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, Hermannsschlacht, or Varusschlacht, Italian: Disfatta di Varo), described as the Varian Disaster (Clades Variana) by Roman historians, took place in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and decisively destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Publius Quinctilius Varus.

On June 17, 1775, early in the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the British defeated the Americans at the Battle of Bunker Hill in Massachusetts. Despite their loss, the inexperienced colonial forces inflicted significant casualties against the enemy, and the battle provided them with an important confidence boost.

The Battle of Valmy was the first major victory by the army of France during the Revolutionary Wars that followed the French Revolution. The action took place on 20 September 1792 as Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick attempted to march on Paris.

The Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing) was a battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought April 6–7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee.

The Battle of the Metaurus was a pivotal battle in the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, fought in 207 BC near the Metauro River in Italy. The battle holds a chapter in the classic The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851) by Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy.

The Battle of Pharsalus was a decisive battle of Caesar's Civil War. On 9 August 48 BC at Pharsalus in central Greece, Gaius Julius Caesar and his allies formed up opposite the army of the republic under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus ("Pompey the Great").

Saragarhi Day is a Sikh military commemoration day celebrated on 12 September every year to commemorate the Battle of Saragarhi. Sikh military personnel and civilians commemorate the battle around the world every year on 12 September.

Find out more about the history of Siege of Orléans, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com Find out more about the history of Siege of Orléans, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more.

Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful invasion of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings (Operation Neptune, commonly known as D-Day).

The Battle of Leyte Gulf (Filipino: Labanan sa Golpo ng Leyte) is generally considered to have been the largest naval battle of World War II and, by some criteria, possibly the largest naval battle in history.

The First Battle of Bull Run (the name used by Union forces), also known as the First Battle of Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces), was fought on July 21, 1861 in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of the city of Manassas and about 25 miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C.

The Battle of Zama—fought in 202 BC near Zama (Tunisia)—marked the end of the Second Punic War. A Roman army led by Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (Scipio), with crucial support from Numidian leader Masinissa, defeated the Carthaginian army led by Hannibal.